Sheer random fluke. Originally I was on a normal team - then that team got shut down, and I was transferred to a new team that was partially remote. Management wanted us to go into our nearest office, but it was far and nobody on the team was there anyways, so it was pointless. Management knew we might quit if they made us trek 3 hours round trip to this empty office, and the project was behind schedule and they couldn’t afford to find new devs. That was that.

It helps that the current project is iOS and there’s a dearth of qualified iOS devs here. If it was some generic service work, we probably wouldn’t have had much leverage. Crazy way to start my career!